Abstracts (İngilizce Özetler)

Finally, on time, but

ŞÜKRÜ ARGIN

This essay tries, first, to grasp the spirit that was reflected as embodied in the works of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, then it strives to understand how the Turkish adventure of that spirit passed through. The affinity between theory and praxis, or put it straightforwardly, the mediation by which each of them mediates the other, is the foundation spirit finds itself. It has been argued that the polarization between Marcuse and Horkheimer/Adorno tandem during 68’s student revolt was inherent in the original formulation of critical theory, which dissects theory and practice in their interrelated totalities. But the ‘spirit’ of critical theory has always overcome this obstacle, and although they followed different paths, they remained completely faithful to that spirit. The essay concludes with the reception of critical theory in Turkey, with a strong emphasis on the difficulties of the appropriation of critical theory in late-modern conditions.

***

Neumann and Habermas: In the critical context of modern rule of law

LEVENT KÖKER

After a brief historical and conceptual account of modern rule of law and after putting forward major elements of criticism of the liberal idea of rule of law by Franz Neumann, a former member of the Frankfurt School, this article tries to explain the distinguishing features of Jürgen Habermas’s critical reconstruciton of an idea of rule of law as democratic procedure. The main argument of the article is that the Habermasian critical approach to the relationship between rule of law and democracy is based on his understanding of the problems of legitimation in the modern state and establishes an inseparable connection between private and public autonomy (that is between individual rights and liberties and means of political participation), whereas the liberal idea and its class-based socialistic critiqe by Neumann, in principle, relegates the individual rights to the non-political private sphere.

***

Habermas as a citizen-philosopher: The critical power of the Kantian project

DEVRİM SEZER

Habermas’s project of communicative action has been widely debated both by his sympathetic followers and fierce critics over the last decades. It is not the purpose of this article to present and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of Habermas’s project in its entirety. Nor does it aim to discuss the reception of Habermas’s work within social and political philosophy. The article has a modest objective: to present, and ultimately defend, Habermas’s contribution to Critical Theory by concentrating on his account of practical reason and his rehabilitation of the Kantian project. In presenting Habermas as a “citizen-philosopher”, I hope to show the critical and normative power of his thinking and its relevance to some of today’s contoversial issues such as genetic engineering and the future course of international politics.

***

Habermas and the validity of social rights

AYŞEN CANDAŞ BİLGEN

This article introduces a paradox in Habermas’s idea of social rights. Readers familiar with Habermas’s body of work would be tempted to think that Habermas favors defending the absolute justifiability of social rights. Yet a close investigation of his theory of procedural law shows that social rights have a derivate and secondary status in his conception of a basic rights system. This article concerns itself with the evidence of this rather unexpected finding while probing Habermas’s justifications for his argument. While there is no doubt that Habermas perceives negative entitlements and social rights in particular as outcomes that could be paternalistically granted as opposed to being essentially democratic rights, it is not clear how this claim can be reconciled with Habermas’s co-originality thesis on the one hand and historical evidence on the other hand. Habermas attempts to hold on to the idea of equi-primordiality of democracy and rights, while his Discourse Principle and the validity argument that is inherent in it suggest that the revealed consent of the participants is the only criterion of democratic legitimacy. This article argues that in assigning priority to a purely proceduralist type of democracy which does not concern itself with social justice, Habermas lays his trust in the irreversibility of welfare state institutions and a political liberalism, both of which he believes are fully internalized by European societies. This underlying political culture assumption in fact reveals a right-Hegelian bias that betrays Habermas’s decidedly Kantian ideas as well as his left-Hegelian past.

***

“What to do when the world’s gone kitsch”

HASAN ÜNAL NALBANTOĞLU

Coming to grips in analytical terms with the now-pervasive phenomenon of kitsch as well as the economic, technological, social, cultural and political processes of modern life responsible for its growth and seemingly perpetual stay demands a rigorous inquiry into a variety of societal practices and mentalities wrapping them, especially towards a possible future study concerning the sway of the same phenomenon in Turkey. In this respect, at least, the present article cannot pretend to exhaust its elusive yet all-too-present object of inquiry. Yet, given the nature of reactions and condemnations of especially the defenders of ‘high arts, it wishes to fulfill its task with minimum of ‘moralizing,’ perhaps not always successfully. Nevertheless, it can be perceived as an attempt, hopefully, at genuine ‘wonderment’ (and not as a piece of mere ‘curiosity’) in the face of the paradoxical growth of kitsch out of the very womb of what is known to be a condescending ‘high art.’ No easy answers, but “A Reader’s Guide to Perplexity.”

***

Weimar intellectuals read detective novels

AYKUT ÇELEBİ

Reading detective novels is an ardent pleasure in which one start out many adventurous journeys on a comfortable couch in a cold winter night. Detective novels are special sub-genre of the so-called criminal novels which has aroused a curiosity both on a big city life and the “murder as fine art”. The detective traces the signs in every detail so that disinterested or impertinent phenomena are to be aggregated into a meaningful totality by which the case is illuminated. This takes place in the mise en scéne of the metropolis. The detective feels at home in the big city life. Weimar intellectuals are the first philosophers and literary critiques that have been realized the contingent juxtaposition of the tracing the criminal elements in the city, and trying to find out the reality, that is lost within capitalist domination and is hidden behind the complex big city life.

Siegfried Kracauer searched for the truth in surface phenomena and tried to capture it in lived experiences of the metropolitan life. He criticises the detective novels as imaginary and rational constructs which miss totally mysterious nature of the modern metropolitan subjective experience and pay scant attention to the details which promises at the beginning.

Walter Benjamin, on the contrary, sees at the figure of the detective on the one hand the nodal point of the metropolitan experience on which the crowds and dangerous classes play the primary roles. But on the other hand, he finds at he gaze of the detective a romantic “Blick”, a gaze oriented to historical details, details which has been surrogated and surpassed by a new mode of production and perception.

Bertolt Brecht as an analytical observer of capitalist modernity and its crime-hidden nature, has been not only an confirmed reader of criminal novels, but also an amateur writer of detective stories. He and Walter Benjamin had been planned together a noir detective novel about which a true motive of crimes are to be explored in terms of material interests and real motives beside passions and intension. Brecht rejected radical schema of the detective novels and purposed a radical change in which the crime and criminal are explained in a different perspective.

For Ernst Bloch, the not-yet-narrated part of the detective novel is the most exciting. The reader reconstructs the not-yet-part of the mystery by self and invents the truth of the genre. For the detective the truth lies elsewhere. At the beginning of the genre, which corresponds the rise of enlightened capitalism, the detective was a hero, who rationally and analytically collects traces, and find a rational solution to enigma. After the rise of organized capitalism, the detective has lost rational capability and gained a new one, i.e. intuitive capability. This was the triumph of philosophy of Bergson over J.S. Mill.

At the second half of the 20th Century, together with the advances in the genre, detective novels have lost their privileged position. This is the sign not only the end of a natural death of a sub-genre, but also the unnatural death of the philosophical and literary gaze over details, over phenomenon, last but not least, over the concept of the political. This is the main thesis of this study.

***

Prophetic and “pedantic”?: Ernst Bloch and critical theory

TANIL BORA

Although critical theory’s refined and well-established attempts at analyzing the penetration of enormous capitalist domination into the world, which is also mediated through that domination, are clear theoretical interventions for the practical purposes they set for themselves in formulating critical theory, so the argumentation goes, they were, in the very end, resulted in a kind of cynic regression into ‘theory’, that the brute force of the reflection has left no place for the subject to act upon. This article offers a humble re-evaluation of that critical attitude with an emphasis on the convergencies and divergiencies among Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas in the theoretical body of Frankfurt School. Bloch is committed to the cause of critical theory, but remained a marginal figure. He is akin to a kind of voluntarism, somehow idealistic in that he imagines a subject, who is full of objective reasons, subjectivity of pure objectivity. The critique of society, and of history by critical theory risks a sterilization of retreat from the social reality, the same thing may also be said about Bloch that he opens himself to the risk of imperfect and incorrect saying, in trying to build a real-concrete utopian spur in order to participate in the remaking of the world.

The article touches upon frankly fractiousness between Bloch and other members of critical theory, considering some vital themes in his thinking, like the possibility and impossibility of story-telling; pessimism-optimism and the possibility of truth in false; historical remnant and continuity; natural law; authentic, dialectic and revolutionary metaphysics; the emancipatory potentiality of religions. It is concluded that the tension among Bloch, Adorno and Horkheimer is still a productive starting point for a vivid debate on critical theory.

***

Enlightenment vs enlightenment, rationalism vs rationalism:

the critique of techno-science in Frankfurt School critical theory and epistemological history

ADİLE ARSLAN AVAR

By taking a departure from Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this article aims at articulating their critical theory to Bachelard and Canguilhem’s epistemological history (or critical rationalism) in order to problematize the founding (problematique) concepts having conditioned the theoretical, methodological and experimental practices of biotechnologies. The latter is the latest articulation of the Enlightenment and mechanistic science. Horkheimer and Adorno on the one side, and Bachelard and Canguilhem, on the other, albeit in different disciplines and ways, and with different questions, problematize the western tradition of rationalism whose origins go as back as the Greeks. For Horkheimer and Adorno, despite Enlightenment promised for emancipation by the progress of reason, this very progress has culminated in enslavement of the men/women and nature by the reduction of reason to instrumentality within the dialectic of enlightenment. This paradox has harnessed the whole history to irrationality. Science and technology are specific instances of enlightenment whereby the unconditional reduction of reason to instrumentality goes beyond all calculations and falls into irrational domination of nature. The originary fullfilment of the enlightenment would be possible by reversing it from within by the critical potential that resides within reason itself. For Bachelard, the established forms of logic, epistemology, rationalism and science, all of which depend on fixed, undialectical notions of theory, subject and object, should be owercome by a philosophy of no. The latter is possible through a refined dialectic between scientific mind, objects, concepts and metaphors. Canguilhem constitutes his epistemology of life sciences within the space that was openned by Bachelard’s intervention. His dialectic operate between life and science at the level of concepts and problems that are posed by life to mechanistic conceptions. Considering together with Horkheimer and Adorno’s and also Bachelard’s ctitiques, Canguilhem’s epistemology can be taken as as space within which their dialectical thought were figured as a dialectic between life and the concepts imposed on life by the Cartesian mechanistic science.

***

Leo Lowenthal, and others

BEYBİN KEJANLIOĞLU

This article focuses on Leo Lowenthal and his work on sociology of literature, and on how he integrates the questions of mass communication, popular culture and art into the sociology of literature. Even though Lowenthal is one of the earliest members and a central figure of the Institute for Social Research both in Germany and in the US, his work has been neglected or obscured in the literature on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. This neglect may due to the fact that he never directly dealt with philosophical problems, yet the underlying assumptions of the social philosophy and critical theory of the Frankfurt School did perhaps nowhere find such a loyal analysis than that of Lowenthal’s. The presentation of Lowenthal’s work in this article seeks to challenge the critical theory literature by reversing the position of Leo Lowenthal, mainly discussing his work and evaluating its relation to the work of other members of the Institute. Yet giving him prominence is not without criticism.

***

Emancipatory potentials of art in critical theory

GAYE İLHAN DEMİRYOL

The fate of art has been determined in the last three centuries by Enlightenment, which perceived art as an expression of subjective experience and confined it to the realm of fiction, passion, irrationality. In the writings of two Frankfurt School thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, this view of art is abolished to make room for aesthetic experience as an appropriate form of dialectical and materialist cognition. This essay evaluates the role of art-particularly mechanically reproduced forms of art, in the writings of Benjamin and Adorno. Central claim is that both thinkers share a similar conviction as to the emancipatory potentials of the work of art. Yet, they evaluate the effects of technological innovation differently. The underpinnings of this later resolved discord, however, is philosophical. In contrast to Benjamin’s fate in the internal dynamics of technological development, for Adorno the relevant category of emancipation remains the individual subject. Their intellectual conversation urges us to reflect critically upon the effects of technological development on art in order to comprehend contemporary society.

***

Cameralism: The birth and development of modern administrative and fiscal thought

CEYHUN GÜRKAN

The paper aspires to present the intellectual foundations of early modern administrative and fiscal system in the west. Towards that aim, cameralism, the German art of government, proves to be our departure point. We claim that without considerations on cameralism, which has been remained less than fully appreciated in the history of social sciences, it is not possible to achieve an overall understanding of the historical development and present situation of governmental techniques and fiscal science. In the paper we define cameralism both as a literature on the art of government and a bureaucratic process specific to the German principalities and regional states between 15th-18th centuries. After making some points considering the ambiguous definitional aspects of cameralism up front, we elaborate cameralistics within the historical conditions, among which the particularistic structure of the German Empire (I. Reich) heads the list, that gave rise to the early modern type of governmentality, by relating cameralism with Polizeiwissenschaft, the science of the good order. In the foregoing argument, we take up cameralism within three periods which were different from each other in terms of historical circumstances and, therefore, thoughts on government. These are 1475-1618, 1648-1727, 1727-1830. The first period began with the peasant wars and ends with the Thirty Years’ War. The second period marks the maturation of cameralism and the last one corresponds to the period of academic cameralism as a university science and the décadence of cameralism. We gave a considerable space to the third period within which we examine the influence of eighteenth-century intellectual trends and scientific inquiries on cameralism. Kant’s Critical Philosophy was of great importance on the way towards the termination of cameralism within the intellectual field of the time and universities. In conclusion, we touch upon the importance of cameralism for both the history of German social sciences and the Ottoman economic and administrative thought. We know some relations between the Ottoman bureaucrats charged with foreign affairs and cameralists, which is yet to be fully explored.

***

“Exclusive recognition: The ethnicization of the migrant antipathy in the Turkish metropoles”

CENK SARAÇOĞLU

This article attempts to draw a general framework for understanding the nature and dynamics of the recently rising xenophobic sentiments against Kurdish migrants living in the slums of the Turkish metropoles such as Mersin, Antalya, İzmir etc. The analysis will be predicated upon the discourses revealed in the depth interviews made in İzmir, which was a part of an extensive field study that I conducted in 2006. The field study unravels many important relations, processes and mechanisms involved in the formation of the anti-Kurdish discourse in the metropoles, but, the scope of this short article will be rather limited with drawing a typology of this xenophobic sentiment, situating it within the history of the Turkish nationalism and thereby discerning its unprecedentedness and historical specificity.

Based on the observations and interviews in the field study, it can be seen that every manifestation of anti-Kurdish discourse in daily life involves a logic that recognizes and excludes the Kurdish migrants as an other ’people’ or ‘ethnic group’. From this point, the article intends to analyze this recently rising anti-Kurdish discourse under the abstraction of ‘exclusive recognition’.

***

Religion and citizenship in elementary school textbooks in post-revolutionary Iran

GÜLİZ KENDİRCİ

Iran became an Islamic Republic in 1979 after overthrow of the Constitutional Monarchy ruled by Pehlevi Dynasty since 1925. After the revolution, Islamic regime prepared a new constitution based on Islamic principles and stablished Shi’a Islam of the Twelver sect as official religion. Their aim was to transform Iranian society to an Islamic nation.

New regime used education, which has been one of the most important means of political socialization since the emergence of nation states, to create new Iranian Islamic citizen that the nation state has crucially required. Education system was restructed and content of textbooks was amended.

This paper aims to analyze the conception of citizenship in relation to religion in Iran Islamic Republic through an examining of the elementary school textbooks. After examining the text books, it has been concluded that Iran Islamic Republic is an Islamic nation state. The policy of this state is to create an Islamic society by means of the nationalization of the religious symbols or by adding a religious content to the national symbols.

The features of the ideal citizen conceived by the political regime of Iran Islamic Republic are being Iranian, Muslim and Shia, concomitantly. The most important duty of this citizen is to protect the religion of the country and the motherland. The Iranian citizen, having socialized in the triangle of the family, the mosque and the school is responsible to God for all his actions because God is the only sovereign. The Iranian citizen, so accustomed to the paternal authority prevalent in the family, is supposed to learn to obey all the commands of the religous guide of the country.

The enemies of Iran Islamic Republic are outside: they are those governments that rule their people with non-Islamic rules. Iran Islamic Republic assumes that these governments attempt to destroy Islamic government of Iran. Under such a threat the duty of the citizen is to protect his religion and the country for the sake of his life.